Monday, January 30, 2017

Actors and the Infinite Field of Creativity Within

LIFE 101

When I watch the Oscars presentation, it seems like the stars are treated like Olympian gods and goddesses. Stars, after all, are lights in the heavens, so the Olympian reference seems apt.

We lionize actors because they perform valuable services. On the obvious level, their art lifts our spirits, opens our minds, and warms our hearts. More subtly, they sometimes portray heroes who embody life lived from full potential. They put their egos aside so their characters can take over. The very best channel many different kinds of characters from their center. We delight in watching such channeling because we yearn to find that center in ourselves, which can open vast creativity.

A Transcendental Meditation teacher for decades, and now founder of Higher Self Healing Meditation launched in 2010, I’ve given many hundreds of people the experience of that center, the higher Self within. This is a pure field of creative intelligence, a source of limitless creativity that can manifest as acting, music, art, or less “arty” fields, like gardening, managing, and virtually any human activity.

True genius actors draw from within themselves a wide range of characters; I’m thinking of Meryl Streep and Dustin Hoffman, rather than Sylvester Stallone, who’s often played the same character.

Meryl, Dustin and the Cosmic Role of Actors

Meryl Streep’s oeuvre is remarkable for how many different characters have lived inside her. Perhaps the highest role she plays each time she plays a role is she reminds us that we, too, play roles. As the transcendental Being in us manifests as human, the Universal becomes an individual. Your Being plays roles as whatever you do in the world. As Teilhard de Chardin put it, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience, but spiritual beings having a human experience.”

Meryl Streep has portrayed with pitch-perfect accuracy accents that were Polish (Sophie’s Choice), Danish (Out of Africa), Italian (The Bridges of Madison County), British (Iron Lady), Irish (Dancing at Lughnasa), Australian (A Cry in the Dark), and Chilean (The House of the Spirits), as well as American accents from the South, Midwest, and New York. She’s played women who are straight, gay, dying, even dead. That she’s won only three Oscars, while passed over the 16 other times she was nominated, is a mystery to me.

Naturally, Streep and Hoffman are separate from their varied roles, like your inner Self, because it’s transcendental, is separate from your body, perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and personality. Like actors who play many roles, so do you: spouse, parent, child, sibling, employee, client, rep, etc. More cosmically, as expressed in the Bhagavad Gita, the textbook of Yoga, the actor, remaining detached from the roles he plays, is like your higher Self, which, remaining detached, has played the role of many individuals through your soul’s many lifetimes. This lifetime it’s been you, in a past life someone else, in a future one, assuming you don’t realize your higher in this lifetime, someone else.
In the Gita, Krishna, the teacher, tells his student, “As a man casting off worn-out garments takes other new ones, so the dweller in the body casting off worn-out bodies takes others that are new.” (Maharishi Mahesh Yogi translation)

The actor detaches from who he is to let another being live through him. When you realize your true nature, you let another being live through you; not a new character but who you’ve always been. You’ll see that your personality is really a role, just like Clark Kent is a role Superman plays. To paraphrase the Wizard of Oz, “Pay less attention to the actor behind the dropping curtain. Not because he’s a fraud, like the wizard, but because he represents the infinite creativity within yourself.

While he might not invite you to play Hamlet, Stanley Kowalski, or Groucho’s Rufus T. Firefly, he quietly invites you to connect to the silent, yet infinitely creative source within yourself through meditation.”